Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks: the Virtual Distance Vector Protocol

A novel routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks, named virtual distance vector (VDV), is presented. This protocol augments AODV with a virtual overlay, unrelated to the actual network topology, which accounts for routes kept proactively by mobile nodes acting as scouts toward the nodes in the respective subsets of peers. This provides routes from any source to any destination node, along which data packets can be routed without the need of preliminary route discovery. The intended goal of VDV was to reduce the average end-to-end delivery time of data packets. VDV has been evaluated against AODV by running extensive simulation under OPNET Modeler. Simulation confirmed the expected advantage of VDV, which increases with increasing node mobility and average route length. The confidence intervals of reported data showed that VDV fits better the dynamic nature of the network.